Wayne Wu

wayne_wu.jpg

I am a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Bolei Zhou. Previously, I served as a Research Scientist at Shanghai AI Lab, where I led the Virtual Human Group. I was also a Visiting Scholar at Nanyang Technological University, working with Chen Change Loy. In June 2022, I obtained my PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University.

Research

My research lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics. I aim to develop human-centric embodied AI systems capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with real-world environments populated by humans. To advance this vision, I address key challenges in the scalability of robot learning environments, the situational awareness of agents, and the realism of populated virtual humans. My work explores three primary directions:

  • Scalable Embodied AI Simulators: Developing large-scale robot learning platforms with diverse assets and infinite urban scenes, and enabling high-efficiency robot training, as in MetaUrban, URBAN-SIM, Vid2Sim, and OmniObject3D.
  • Situational Behavior Modeling: Building autonomous decision-making models of humans and other agents, to behave robustly based on multimodal understanding of surroundings -- including vision, audio, and language, as in EmbodiedHuman, PedGen, and Seeing-to-Experiencing.
  • Realistic Virtual Humans: Constructing high-fidelity 4D volumetric capture systems and datasets, as in DNA-Rendering and RenderMe-360; and developing human foundation models to obtain generalizable representations, as in CosmicMan and MotionBert.

News

May, 2025 We are organizing the workshop on Real-to-Sim: Bridging the Gap between Neural Rendering and Robot Learning at CVPR 2025. 🔥
May, 2025 We are organizing the workshop on Embodied “Humans”: Symbiotic Intelligence Between Virtual Humans and Humanoid Robots at CVPR 2025. 🔥
Jan, 2025 We released MetaUrban – a simulation platform for Embodied AI in urban spaces. Try it now!
Mar, 2024 We are organizing the workshop on Virtual Humans for Robotics and Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2024.
Jun, 2023 OmniObject3D is selected as Best Paper Candidate at CVPR 2023.
Oct, 2022 I am leading OpenXDLab – a new large-scale open-source data platform!
Aug, 2020 We are organizing Workshop on Sensing, Understanding and Synthesizing Humans, ECCV 2020.
Jul, 2020 We released MMAction2 – OpenMMLab’s Next Generation Action Understanding Toolbox.
Jul, 2020 We released MMEditing – OpenMMLab’s Image and Video Editing Toolbox.
Oct, 2019 We are organizing Workshop on Statistical Deep Learning for Computer Vision, ICCV 2019.

Selected Publications

  1. Towards Autonomous Micromobility through Scalable Urban Simulation
    Wayne Wu *, Honglin He*, Chaoyuan Zhang, Jack He, Seth Z. Zhao, Ran Gong, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    arXiv Project Page
    Highlight
  2. Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban Navigation
    Ziyang Xie, Zhizheng Liu, Zhenghao Peng,  Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    arXiv Project Page
  3. MetaUrban: An Embodied AI Simulation Platform for Urban Micromobility
    Wayne Wu *, Honglin He*, Jack He, Yiran Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhizheng Liu, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
    Spotlight
  4. CosmicMan: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model for Humans
    Shikai Li, Jianglin Fu, Kaiyuan Liu, Wentao Wang, Kwan-Yee Lin, and Wayne Wu †
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
    Highlight
  5. RenderMe-360: A Large Digital Asset Library and Benchmarks Towards High-fidelity Head Avatars
    Contributors to RenderMe-360
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Datasets and Benchmarks, 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  6. DNA-Rendering: A Diverse Neural Actor Repository for High-Fidelity Human-centric Rendering
    Contributors to DNA-Rendering
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  7. SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modeling
    Zhitao Yang, Zhongang Cai, Haiyi Mei, Shuai Liu, Zhaoxi Chen, Weiye Xiao, Yukun Wei, Zhongfei Qing, Chen Wei, Bo Dai,  Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, and Lei Yang
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  8. OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation
    Tong Wu, Jiarui Zhang, Xiao Fu, Yuxin Wang, Jiawei Ren, Liang Pan,  Wayne Wu, Lei Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Chen Qian, Dahua Lin, and Ziwei Liu
    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
    arXiv Project Page
    Best Paper Candidate
  9. StyleGAN-Human: A Data-Centric Odyssey of Human Generation
    Jianglin Fu, Shikai Li, Yuming Jiang, Kwan-Yee Lin, Chen Qian, Chen Change Loy,  Wayne Wu†, and Ziwei Liu
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  10. Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm
    Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Shuo Yang, Quan Wang, Yici Cai, and Qiang Zhou
    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018
    arXiv YouTube Project Page